Challenger for Vine: Facebook launches video for Instagram

So the much anticipated 20 July Facebook event has ended, with no real surprise.

Almost every tech blog worth its salt predicted that Facebook would launch video for Instagram and that’s exactly what they did.

The main features of the new video service include the ability to create up to 15 seconds of video, image stabilisation (creatively called cinema) and ‘custom cover frames’ -which essentially means that you get to choose which frame you want to make the ‘public’ frame.

And because this is Instagram, there are obviously filters. In this case, thirteen of them.

Screengrab of Video on Instagram.

“What we did to photos we just did to video,” said Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom at the event.

The new features will be avilable by way of an app and are up for download on both iOS and Android.

This is of course, direct competition to Twitter’s vine video service, which also allows users to record and upload short videos with their tweets.

You can directly upload these videos on Faceook, just like you would with Facebook video. The team at Facebook seem confident that the site will be able to handle tricky issues like buffering time and load time.

However as of now, you can’t upload these videos to Instagram. You can only use the app to shoot them.